Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Given the death before Christmas of the Soviet weapons designer Mikhail Kalashnikov, I thought it was a good time to post this review of a book from 2010, which made a study of his most famous invention: the iconic AK-47...

“The Gun: The AK-47 and the
Evolution of War”

by C.J. Chivers

Few guns achieve iconic status. One of those that indubitably has is the
AK-47 – the Kalashnikov. Simply
engineered, reliable and easy to use, it is now nearly ubiquitous, with an
estimated 100 million examples currently in circulation. Instantly recognisable the world over, it is a
subject of political iconography from the gable-ends of Belfast
to the flags of Hezbollah and Mozambique,
and is the weapon of choice for generations of freedom fighters, terrorists and
jihadis. It has become ‘the people’s
gun’.

With the book market teeming with ‘micro-histories’ of
everything from cod, to sugar, to the Atlantic Ocean itself, it was perhaps
inevitable that someone should seek to tackle a brand as powerful and as
malevolently cool as the AK-47. Yet, C.
J. Chivers’ book “The Gun” goes further than retracing the story of the
weapon’s development and its subsequent emergence as an icon – fascinating
though it is. This, he claims, is a gun
that has changed the very nature of warfare and has even altered history
itself.

It is certainly a remarkable story. According to the Soviet mythology, Mikhail Kalashnikov
– himself the son of an exiled kulak – was the original proletarian hero: a man
whose patriotism and class consciousness, fired by service in World War Two,
had led him to single-handedly design the most successful weapon of all time.

As ever, the truth is rather more prosaic. As Chivers relates, the gun was a hybrid of existing
rifle technology and was the product of more minds than one. Thus, though Kalashnikov certainly played a
central role in its development, there were some who later questioned whether
his name should have been appended to the weapon at all.

The gun’s real, large-scale debut would be in Vietnam, where
its rivalry with the American M-16 would carry with it much wider connotations:
capitalist versus communist, peasant versus professional soldier. The Kalashnikov won hands down. More reliable, more hardy and cheaper to
produce, it won many plaudits, even being preferred by some US Marines to their
standard-issue weapon.

Chivers writes very well, as one would expect from a Pulitzer
Prize winner. His descriptions of
set-pieces, such as a jungle fire-fight or an attempted assassination, are
exemplary. He also works hard to
disentangle the mythology surrounding the weapon’s development and is admirably
clear when explaining technological matters.

Yet, there are a couple of caveats. For one thing, the book is rather overlong
and would have benefitted from some judicious cutting. Though impeccably-researched and engagingly
presented, it spends fully four chapters explaining the background history of
automatic weaponry, when surely one would have sufficed. Also, the book’s episodic, impressionistic
feel – shifting from Vietnam
to Afghanistan to Iraq and
elsewhere – tends to rob it of a narrative focus and definable structure.

More seriously, Chivers seems to wrestle rather
unconvincingly and inconclusively with the wider aspects of his story. The overarching context of the book is that of
the profound changes wrought by the miniaturisation, simplification and
democratisation of automatic weaponry, as exemplified by the AK-47. The original automatic gun – the Gatling – resembled
an artillery piece and required a crew of men to fire it, whilst the
Kalashnikov is about the size of a tennis racquet, the weight of an axe and can
be had for around $200. There is a very valid
point to be made here, but Chivers does not quite make it coherently or
explicitly enough, almost preferring the argument to materialise incidentally
as he goes along.

Yet, these complaints should not detract from a formidable
feat of research and writing. Chivers’ story
of the Kalashnikov is a fascinating and complex one, which encompasses both the
darkest days of the Cold War and the asymmetric warfare of the early 21st
Century, and features illuminating asides on technological developments and
wider strategic concerns. He has
marshalled these myriad sources well and has surely produced the final word on
one of the most brutally effective and iconic weapons of our times.